This article is the first in a series on the topic of dependencies and how to deal with them to achieve successful outcomes when utilizing agile at scale. In this short article I will define what I mean by dependencies and emphasize that shared dependencies are the ones…
A feature team is a cross-functional and cross-component team that can pull end-customer-valuable items from the product backlog (i.e., “features”) and complete them. One approach to creating feature teams is to combine people with experience in each of the components…
Have you found yourself in a situation where a decision has to be made and the people involved believe there to be only two choices? The decision could be as simple as “Do we go out to dinner or do we stay at home?” Or, “Should we build Product A or not?” Typically,…
From an agile perspective, we never let an important assumption live long in an unvalidated or low-confidence state. The risk in doing so is that we end up making decisions or creating work products on top of the yet-to-be-validated or low-confidence assumptions that…
My wife and I are angel investors – individuals who provide capital to start-up businesses in exchange for equity ownership. We typically invest at the very early stages of a company after friends and family have invested and before venture capitalists invest. Agile…
The 2020 version of the Scrum Guide defines an artifact by the name of “Increment.” This represents a renaming of an already existing Scrum artifact that historically was referred to as either “potentially releasable product increment” or a “potentially shippable product…
As I have written previously, organizations that adopt agile typically focus on applying agile within development or IT organizations (see Agile Adoption Across the Enterprise: Still in the Chasm, and Agile Misalignment Through the Enterprise Value Chain). As a result,…
For the past year and half, I have been coaching a very large company through its agile transformation. When I first started, I noticed that a particular expression was frequently used by several different people. The expression is “learn into it.”
I like this…
Many things can go wrong when organizations implement Scrum. And too often, the very leaders who pushed for an agile adoption are the ones who unwittingly create roadblocks and obstacles to its success. This article discusses 3 big mistakes I see leaders make when…
Planning for all contingencies in a complex environment is not realistic. Things frequently can and do go wrong. If all available resources have been fully allocated to complete the planned work, then when high-priority unexpected work (or more precisely, unplanned-for…